Post by So|Napir on Feb 27, 2007 20:07:38 GMT 1
Mark Rein Interview
By: TeamXbox Staff - "TeamXbox"
February 13th, 2007
Surely, you’ve read what Cliff Bleszinski, Epic’s lead designer, has had to say to TeamXbox about Gears of War, Unreal Tournament and Unreal Engine. Now’s your chance to check out what another of the Epic team, Mark Rein, the company’s VP and co-founder, has on his mind. They might work under the same roof, but they have different approaches to dishing the dirt.
Gears of War…where does it go from here?
Mark Rein: We shipped the game and it’s done really well, and we’ve been thrilled about the reaction to it. Over the moon, no question. And we’ve done one update to it—one major…or minor update to it. We’ve released one free content pack. And there’s more stuff coming…we’re still working on it. I don’t want to say specifically what we’re going to have, but there’ll be a fun little surprise in the next update.
[As if anticipating what our next question will be…] I don’t know when that’ll be. People always ask us, “Can’t you tell me when it is?” Well, what they don’t seem to understand is, on the PC, when Steve Polge decides to try something on Unreal Tournament, he can put out a beta version and 100,000 people or 10,000 people will download it and say, “Oh, I tried version 1.186 beta and I like how you increased the speed of this or changed this so this bug really is fixed.” We can get immediate feedback and make changes and put out an official version.
You can’t do that on console. You’ve gotta build it, it’s got to go through tests, it got to go through certification. Even after we let it go, it can be three or four weeks before it actually shows up on Xbox Live Marketplace, just depending on what else is scheduled. I don’t really know the dates for things. It’s not as easy as PC for us to just shove something out like that. We’ll see when it comes out, but we’re definitely going to have more stuff.
The bottom line is, we’ve always been a company that’s supported our games—great post-sale support—and we’re devoted to this game. It’s obviously the biggest game we’ve had now, and we’ll treat it like that.
Will a sequel be in the works soon?
Are you thinking within a couple of months for this?
Mark Rein: Definitely within a couple of months. We want to have as regular a stream of new stuff coming for the title. There’ll be some new stuff soon. It’s not months away…it’s maybe a month? When it’s done.
We’re creating new stuff for it, and so you’ll be able to download that. It was great to have the Discovery Channel, through their FutureWeapons, sponsor the last pack, so it was free.
Is that a trend—getting sponsorship to give things to consumers so they don’t have to pay?
Mark Rein: There’s a lot of pressure on us, having the leading game on the platform, to be part of the downloadable economy. We’d love to have everything be free, but, like I say, there’s external pressure on us to participate in that.
The other thing is that, I think we could do a better job on the sponsor stuff. I would have loved to have a commercial play…like what [Sony] showed today with SingStar. [Editor note: Sony’s Phil Harrison demonstrated the PS3 version of its SingStar karaoke game, which showed the accompanying SingStore, where new songs could be purchased.] A streamed-down commercial on that FutureWeapons series…30 seconds or a minute while you’re downloading the add-on pack, and you’d have to watch the whole thing—or at least let it run and go to the bathroom, if you want—and then [the software] could download in the background. I think that would be an awesome service for the Discovery Channel. I also think in this particular case, it’s a great show that people who are into our kinds of games and weapons would actually want to see, and it would have been a huge advertising vehicle for them than just the notoriety they got.
I think that we, as an industry, have to do a better job accommodating sponsors so that the value to them goes up, it’s a much larger value proposition. There’s multiple schools of thought: One school of thought is, we create a big hit game [and] we give stuff away for free so people feel loyal to us, and they’ll come back and buy our next game…or they’ll tell their friends about our game, or they’ll just keep playing it so that more people will want to come in. Another school is we provide good value for advertisers such that it makes the content free for users, and they get some good advertising value out of it. And there’s another one where the users just pay.
The truth is, that’s no different than what we have today on cable TV. Time Warner’s a great example: You have HBO and you pay for that, and there’s no commercials and very high-quality stuff. Then you have CNN or ABC, and the shows you like are on, you watch the commercials, they’re sponsored by advertisers. Again, various degrees of quality—some as good as HBO, some not, but it’s advertiser supported. I don’t see why we can’t have those same kinds of things.
We’re not totally against the idea of charging for content that’s worth the money, but if we can find a way to make it free to our customers, that’d be great—and help advertisers promote products.
Have you formally acknowledged other versions of Gears coming?
Mark Rein: Nope. It’s an Xbox 360 exclusive.
And stays that way?
Mark Rein: ’Til there’s something else. (chuckles) People ask me, “Are you going to do it on PC?” Yeah, eventually…I don’t think that’s any great secret that we would like to do it on PC, but for now it’s a 360 game. Eventually we’ll get around to a PC version. I just don’t know when.
That’s worked successfully for Halo. Halo was a big seller on PC long after it kind of peaked on the original Xbox, and they’re doing the same thing now with Halo 2. We work at the pleasure of a publisher who thinks both of those are their platforms, so I think it’s ultimately inevitable, and obviously we’re a PC company.
The big challenge is to make a game that was designed solely for the console…to take advantage of every last little corner of that console, to fill every little crack and run as many threads as we could and do as much to exploit the power of that machine, and make it run well on enough PCs to be worth releasing. That’s a challenge. UT will help us there, because Unreal Tournament 3 will be kind of our vanguard PC product, and it’s helping us get optimization on the PC. So it’s just a matter of, now, can we make Gears run on enough PCs that it’s worth selling…or do we have to wait in five years until everyone has a PC that can run it?
It’s inevitable, but it’s just not there today.
So, that’s a good segue way. Unreal Tournament…
Mark Rein: Ah, yeah…I’m so excited about Unreal Tournament. Last week, the developers…we were doing a Sony PlayStation developer conference event in Japan. We had one of our guys speaking there, and out of the blue, two of our PS3 developers walked in with a dev kit, sat it down in my office and started connecting it to the TV on my wall. I was like, “What have you got, guys?”
“Well, you want to see the latest build of UT?”
I’m like,“Yeah!” [very excited]
It looks great and it runs really well. It’s not finished…lots still to do, and certainly a ways to go on it, but it’s fast and fun. That was really exciting. Now that we’ve got Gears of War out of the way, we’re putting the same optimization skills and ideas on how to maximize the platform on PlayStation 3, so we’ll be a strong engine across all three [PS3, PC and Xbox 360].
More importantly, the game is really fun. I can’t add anything to it.
The big thing we’re excited about bringing to console are mods. We’re going to be an open game. We’re gonna take mods from the PC and bring them over to PlayStation 3, and help their developers polish them up. There might even be a way for mod makers to make some money here, because they can sell it through the PlayStation network…
Epic's latest Unreal promises to impress.
And Marketplace?
Mark Rein: We hope so. You know, that’s why we’ve been delayed so long in announcing on Xbox 360, because we were kind of busy with Gears, and it took us a while to get a really positive indication from Microsoft that, yes, we’ll be able to do something like that there as well. We’re excited about that.
Mods are the lifeblood of this game, and part of the reason we delayed announcing the 360 is because UT without mods is half a UT. The mod guys do such an amazing job, and this time we also want to find a way that they can sell their wares if they’re good enough.
We’ll see…it’s still a pipe dream, but I’m confident that we’ll accomplish it in this generation.
So, what were you trying to establish with this version…what was the evolutionary leap you wanted to make?
Mark Rein: This is the third generation. With Unreal Tournament 3, we really want to do is exploit the new hardware capabilities—including consoles…they’ve always been part of the plan. And just bring people the awesome, compelling experience, and hike up the quality of the gameplay, but not lose what’s great about UT. In fact, I think we’ve brought back some of the things that people liked about the original UT—and toned down one or two of the things that people maybe didn’t like about the last game in the series, and, again, just get it right.
The great thing about UT is it’s not like…although we’ll bring back some of those classic levels forward, because people love them so much, it’s always completely new content, completely new characters, completely new vehicles. Even if some of them are evolutionary, some of it is completely revolutionary and new.
UT is a great game. You know, they don’t change football every year. We have to be careful, because it has to be UT, and we can’t be reinventing things just for the sake of reinventing things, but we can always be polishing them, improving them and giving you whole new arenas to play in.
We’re building a new platform for Unreal Tournament, and this is just the start of the new series, and I think people will be very, very happy with this game. UT enthusiasts will be happy, and I think we’ll also be able to reach, thanks to the consoles—and the success of Gears…thanks, Gears team (laughs)—we’ll be able to reach, I hope, a larger audience of people who have never played UT before will be able to experience it.
That was part of the reason for the name change as well. We really wanted to make sure that people understand, this isn’t just a series extension. This is a whole new one. It’s a whole new generation and…the people on the consoles don’t know us, but we want people to try this game.
What’s the progress on the Unreal Engine?
Mark Rein: There’s so many great games coming out in the next year that use the tech. It’s at the point now where it’s a relatively mature technology—at least on 360 and PC, and it’s getting there now on PlayStation 3. And they’re out making games for it. That’s awesome for us.
Rainbow Six Vegas was fantastic, RoboBlitz on Xbox Live Arcade…a lot of people have no idea you could do an Arcade title with Unreal Engine 3, but of course you can. You can do a roller-skating game…you could do Tony Hawk...you could do…I think that’s our job now, to stretch people’s imaginations. You’ve seen all the mods that people did with our last engine, and all the variation you can do.
For example, one of our guys made a golf game. They took Gears of War and made Marcus play golf. It took, I think, two days or maybe a day, and just UnrealScript and a couple of animations he had done—and now Marcus can play golf. It wasn’t Tiger Woods…but it could have been, if you put the right art in it. [smiles]
Midway’s announced that they’re doing the next Mortal Kombat game…you know, another stereotype broken that, well, it’s just a shooter engine. Guess what…they’re doing Mortal Kombat with it. And they’re doing other kinds of games with it…The Wheelman; and Dave Jones is doing basically the successor to GTA with it.
So, there’s all kinds of cool games being done with the technology, and I guess that’s kind of our job over the next few years, is to just broaden people’s imaginations and stop thinking about shooters. I keep telling the guys, can we make a puzzle game, please? Just so that people will stop saying we’re not a puzzle game engine? We have this Unreal Kismet visual-scripting system on which you can make the best puzzle games for way less code and work than you could…using even XNA and other ways that people code up games. We just need to help people broaden their imaginations.
By: TeamXbox Staff - "TeamXbox"
February 13th, 2007
Surely, you’ve read what Cliff Bleszinski, Epic’s lead designer, has had to say to TeamXbox about Gears of War, Unreal Tournament and Unreal Engine. Now’s your chance to check out what another of the Epic team, Mark Rein, the company’s VP and co-founder, has on his mind. They might work under the same roof, but they have different approaches to dishing the dirt.
Gears of War…where does it go from here?
Mark Rein: We shipped the game and it’s done really well, and we’ve been thrilled about the reaction to it. Over the moon, no question. And we’ve done one update to it—one major…or minor update to it. We’ve released one free content pack. And there’s more stuff coming…we’re still working on it. I don’t want to say specifically what we’re going to have, but there’ll be a fun little surprise in the next update.
[As if anticipating what our next question will be…] I don’t know when that’ll be. People always ask us, “Can’t you tell me when it is?” Well, what they don’t seem to understand is, on the PC, when Steve Polge decides to try something on Unreal Tournament, he can put out a beta version and 100,000 people or 10,000 people will download it and say, “Oh, I tried version 1.186 beta and I like how you increased the speed of this or changed this so this bug really is fixed.” We can get immediate feedback and make changes and put out an official version.
You can’t do that on console. You’ve gotta build it, it’s got to go through tests, it got to go through certification. Even after we let it go, it can be three or four weeks before it actually shows up on Xbox Live Marketplace, just depending on what else is scheduled. I don’t really know the dates for things. It’s not as easy as PC for us to just shove something out like that. We’ll see when it comes out, but we’re definitely going to have more stuff.
The bottom line is, we’ve always been a company that’s supported our games—great post-sale support—and we’re devoted to this game. It’s obviously the biggest game we’ve had now, and we’ll treat it like that.
Will a sequel be in the works soon?
Are you thinking within a couple of months for this?
Mark Rein: Definitely within a couple of months. We want to have as regular a stream of new stuff coming for the title. There’ll be some new stuff soon. It’s not months away…it’s maybe a month? When it’s done.
We’re creating new stuff for it, and so you’ll be able to download that. It was great to have the Discovery Channel, through their FutureWeapons, sponsor the last pack, so it was free.
Is that a trend—getting sponsorship to give things to consumers so they don’t have to pay?
Mark Rein: There’s a lot of pressure on us, having the leading game on the platform, to be part of the downloadable economy. We’d love to have everything be free, but, like I say, there’s external pressure on us to participate in that.
The other thing is that, I think we could do a better job on the sponsor stuff. I would have loved to have a commercial play…like what [Sony] showed today with SingStar. [Editor note: Sony’s Phil Harrison demonstrated the PS3 version of its SingStar karaoke game, which showed the accompanying SingStore, where new songs could be purchased.] A streamed-down commercial on that FutureWeapons series…30 seconds or a minute while you’re downloading the add-on pack, and you’d have to watch the whole thing—or at least let it run and go to the bathroom, if you want—and then [the software] could download in the background. I think that would be an awesome service for the Discovery Channel. I also think in this particular case, it’s a great show that people who are into our kinds of games and weapons would actually want to see, and it would have been a huge advertising vehicle for them than just the notoriety they got.
I think that we, as an industry, have to do a better job accommodating sponsors so that the value to them goes up, it’s a much larger value proposition. There’s multiple schools of thought: One school of thought is, we create a big hit game [and] we give stuff away for free so people feel loyal to us, and they’ll come back and buy our next game…or they’ll tell their friends about our game, or they’ll just keep playing it so that more people will want to come in. Another school is we provide good value for advertisers such that it makes the content free for users, and they get some good advertising value out of it. And there’s another one where the users just pay.
The truth is, that’s no different than what we have today on cable TV. Time Warner’s a great example: You have HBO and you pay for that, and there’s no commercials and very high-quality stuff. Then you have CNN or ABC, and the shows you like are on, you watch the commercials, they’re sponsored by advertisers. Again, various degrees of quality—some as good as HBO, some not, but it’s advertiser supported. I don’t see why we can’t have those same kinds of things.
We’re not totally against the idea of charging for content that’s worth the money, but if we can find a way to make it free to our customers, that’d be great—and help advertisers promote products.
Have you formally acknowledged other versions of Gears coming?
Mark Rein: Nope. It’s an Xbox 360 exclusive.
And stays that way?
Mark Rein: ’Til there’s something else. (chuckles) People ask me, “Are you going to do it on PC?” Yeah, eventually…I don’t think that’s any great secret that we would like to do it on PC, but for now it’s a 360 game. Eventually we’ll get around to a PC version. I just don’t know when.
That’s worked successfully for Halo. Halo was a big seller on PC long after it kind of peaked on the original Xbox, and they’re doing the same thing now with Halo 2. We work at the pleasure of a publisher who thinks both of those are their platforms, so I think it’s ultimately inevitable, and obviously we’re a PC company.
The big challenge is to make a game that was designed solely for the console…to take advantage of every last little corner of that console, to fill every little crack and run as many threads as we could and do as much to exploit the power of that machine, and make it run well on enough PCs to be worth releasing. That’s a challenge. UT will help us there, because Unreal Tournament 3 will be kind of our vanguard PC product, and it’s helping us get optimization on the PC. So it’s just a matter of, now, can we make Gears run on enough PCs that it’s worth selling…or do we have to wait in five years until everyone has a PC that can run it?
It’s inevitable, but it’s just not there today.
So, that’s a good segue way. Unreal Tournament…
Mark Rein: Ah, yeah…I’m so excited about Unreal Tournament. Last week, the developers…we were doing a Sony PlayStation developer conference event in Japan. We had one of our guys speaking there, and out of the blue, two of our PS3 developers walked in with a dev kit, sat it down in my office and started connecting it to the TV on my wall. I was like, “What have you got, guys?”
“Well, you want to see the latest build of UT?”
I’m like,“Yeah!” [very excited]
It looks great and it runs really well. It’s not finished…lots still to do, and certainly a ways to go on it, but it’s fast and fun. That was really exciting. Now that we’ve got Gears of War out of the way, we’re putting the same optimization skills and ideas on how to maximize the platform on PlayStation 3, so we’ll be a strong engine across all three [PS3, PC and Xbox 360].
More importantly, the game is really fun. I can’t add anything to it.
The big thing we’re excited about bringing to console are mods. We’re going to be an open game. We’re gonna take mods from the PC and bring them over to PlayStation 3, and help their developers polish them up. There might even be a way for mod makers to make some money here, because they can sell it through the PlayStation network…
Epic's latest Unreal promises to impress.
And Marketplace?
Mark Rein: We hope so. You know, that’s why we’ve been delayed so long in announcing on Xbox 360, because we were kind of busy with Gears, and it took us a while to get a really positive indication from Microsoft that, yes, we’ll be able to do something like that there as well. We’re excited about that.
Mods are the lifeblood of this game, and part of the reason we delayed announcing the 360 is because UT without mods is half a UT. The mod guys do such an amazing job, and this time we also want to find a way that they can sell their wares if they’re good enough.
We’ll see…it’s still a pipe dream, but I’m confident that we’ll accomplish it in this generation.
So, what were you trying to establish with this version…what was the evolutionary leap you wanted to make?
Mark Rein: This is the third generation. With Unreal Tournament 3, we really want to do is exploit the new hardware capabilities—including consoles…they’ve always been part of the plan. And just bring people the awesome, compelling experience, and hike up the quality of the gameplay, but not lose what’s great about UT. In fact, I think we’ve brought back some of the things that people liked about the original UT—and toned down one or two of the things that people maybe didn’t like about the last game in the series, and, again, just get it right.
The great thing about UT is it’s not like…although we’ll bring back some of those classic levels forward, because people love them so much, it’s always completely new content, completely new characters, completely new vehicles. Even if some of them are evolutionary, some of it is completely revolutionary and new.
UT is a great game. You know, they don’t change football every year. We have to be careful, because it has to be UT, and we can’t be reinventing things just for the sake of reinventing things, but we can always be polishing them, improving them and giving you whole new arenas to play in.
We’re building a new platform for Unreal Tournament, and this is just the start of the new series, and I think people will be very, very happy with this game. UT enthusiasts will be happy, and I think we’ll also be able to reach, thanks to the consoles—and the success of Gears…thanks, Gears team (laughs)—we’ll be able to reach, I hope, a larger audience of people who have never played UT before will be able to experience it.
That was part of the reason for the name change as well. We really wanted to make sure that people understand, this isn’t just a series extension. This is a whole new one. It’s a whole new generation and…the people on the consoles don’t know us, but we want people to try this game.
What’s the progress on the Unreal Engine?
Mark Rein: There’s so many great games coming out in the next year that use the tech. It’s at the point now where it’s a relatively mature technology—at least on 360 and PC, and it’s getting there now on PlayStation 3. And they’re out making games for it. That’s awesome for us.
Rainbow Six Vegas was fantastic, RoboBlitz on Xbox Live Arcade…a lot of people have no idea you could do an Arcade title with Unreal Engine 3, but of course you can. You can do a roller-skating game…you could do Tony Hawk...you could do…I think that’s our job now, to stretch people’s imaginations. You’ve seen all the mods that people did with our last engine, and all the variation you can do.
For example, one of our guys made a golf game. They took Gears of War and made Marcus play golf. It took, I think, two days or maybe a day, and just UnrealScript and a couple of animations he had done—and now Marcus can play golf. It wasn’t Tiger Woods…but it could have been, if you put the right art in it. [smiles]
Midway’s announced that they’re doing the next Mortal Kombat game…you know, another stereotype broken that, well, it’s just a shooter engine. Guess what…they’re doing Mortal Kombat with it. And they’re doing other kinds of games with it…The Wheelman; and Dave Jones is doing basically the successor to GTA with it.
So, there’s all kinds of cool games being done with the technology, and I guess that’s kind of our job over the next few years, is to just broaden people’s imaginations and stop thinking about shooters. I keep telling the guys, can we make a puzzle game, please? Just so that people will stop saying we’re not a puzzle game engine? We have this Unreal Kismet visual-scripting system on which you can make the best puzzle games for way less code and work than you could…using even XNA and other ways that people code up games. We just need to help people broaden their imaginations.
Original Article
Interresting story don't you think
